We all know that “CONTENT IS KING” on the WWW. Content farms refer to companies that create web content and fill in areas where there are not user content. Typically, these companies, create articles that are designed to be very search-engine friendly and to generate lots of hits.
From the SEO perspective we all know the websites rich in content get good rankings for the relative keywords. Hence ,these sites which have content on various topics tend to get more organic search traffic. Along with the good rankings these sites usually have Google Adsense as a revenue generator because of varied content available on their content farm website which in return is a money spinner for Google too as they need more and more related real estate on the websites for the success of their PPC programs.
All this is ok, if the visitors get quality content, the content farm website owners get their share of income and Google also benefits monetarily for giving such a platform for website owners on the web.
But, the major question is that,
Are these so called content farms generating quality content which serves all the above purposes ethically?
Or,
Are the search engines in the pursuit of success of their PPC campaigns bringing the downfall of the search industry as a whole?
Maybe this is just the beginning but if there is no check on the quality and correctness of the content apart from the rise or fall of the search industry, the main concern is that the searchers due to poor quality or inaccurate content may end up with misconceptions and thereby have wrong knowledge about a certain topic.
After all, no knowledge is better than wrong knowledge.
No doubt, these content farms are a source for information and information is not knowledge but information is the first step to gain knowledge about the related topic of your interest.
Hence it is high time that some quality checks are introduced to control this information explosion on the web to maintain the royalty of the content which is referred to as KING on the WWW.
August 1, 2010